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The purpose of this study is to systematically review and analyze the literature in the area of liquidity of financial markets. The study summarizes the key findings and approaches and highlights the research gaps in the extant literature.

A variety of reputed databases are utilized to select 100 research papers, from a large pool of nearly 3,000 research papers spanning between 1972 and 2018 using systematic literature review methodology. The selected research papers are organized to provide an in-depth analysis and an account of the ongoing research in the area of liquidity. The study uses bibliometric network visualization and word-cloud analyses to compile and analyze the literature.

The study summarizes the recent approaches in the liquidity research on aspects such as methodologies followed, variables applied, sub-areas covered, and the types of economies and markets covered. The article shows that the literature on liquidity in the emerging markets (e.g. China and India) is deficient. Overall, the following research areas related to liquidity need further exploration in the context of emerging markets: liquidity beyond the best bid-ask quotes, intraday return predictability using microstructure variables (e.g. order imbalances), impact of algorithmic-trading and volatility of liquidity.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, in the recent past, a detailed account of the literature on liquidity has not been published. It provides a comprehensive collection and classification of the literature on the liquidity of financial markets. This would be helpful to the future researchers, academics and practitioners in the area of financial markets.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate long-run commonality in liquidity using multiple proxies computed from limited order book data of NIFTY50 stocks. The findings indicate the existence of systematic liquidity or commonality on NIFTY50 market and comprising industries.

The sample comprises all intraday transactions corresponding to NIFTY 50 stocks for April 2015. The study runs firm by firm time series regressions to test the concept of long-run commonality, while controlling other effects.

Strong evidence is found in support of long-run commonality across three liquidity measures. On the basis of significance (10%) of long-run commonality beta (β_LR), the strength of long-run commonality is found to be highest in natural resources and infrastructure sector. Portfolios having greater exposure to these sectors will face diversification risk to a great extent.

Knowledge of long-run commonality helps portfolio managers in formulating diversification strategies and reshuffling the portfolio over the period. Commonality risk being non-diversifiable is a policy concern for regulators and central bankers. Its empirical evidence will assist in managing exchange organization and thus preventing market crashes because of sudden liquidity evaporation.

Although there are recent studies documenting commonality in short run, little empirical work has been done on commonality in the long run and in emerging markets such as India. This research contributes to the literature by testing concept of commonality in long-run on NIFTY50 stocks using detailed transaction data from National Stock Exchange.

Negative relationship between the return of a stock and its liquidity suggests that the illiquid stocks are riskier than liquid stocks. Thus, researchers tend to include the stock liquidity as a variable in asset pricing models, where the stock and market liquidities are usually considered as independent. The purpose of this paper is to reexamine the relationship between the return of a stock and its liquidity by using a relative measure that links the individual stock liquidity with market‐wide liquidity.

Multivariate regressions are employed to examine the effect of relative market liquidity on the stock return while controlling the effects of other factors.

Negative relationship between the stock return and liquidity is confirmed, but the relationship is not linear. It is found that the relative measure of liquidity is not a substitute, but complement to other liquidity measures used in prior studies. It is also found that fluctuation in relative stock liquidity does not positively affect the return.

The study is conducted on New York Stock Exchange and American Stock Exchange exchanges using monthly data. The robustness tests using the daily or weekly data are not conducted.

Findings may suggest that investors do not seriously concern about the fluctuations of individual stock liquidity, provided that the stock liquidity is higher than the average market liquidity.

For the first time, the liquidity risk is tested using a relative measure instead of an absolute measure. Since fluctuation in stock liquidity does not positively affect the return, a new question arises whether the variability in liquidity can reflect the liquidity risk.

We form portfolios based on return and liquidity and examine the effects of liquidity and other risk factors on asset pricing in the Chinese stock market. Our results show that the past loser-and-illiquid stock portfolios tend to outperform the past winner-and-liquid stock portfolios in the 1–12 months holding period. The excess return is significantly associated with the market-wide liquidity factor even when we control the three Fama-French and momentum factors. Cross-sectionally, the liquidity beta significantly affects the excess return even with control of other risk betas and other traditional liquidity proxies.

The purpose of this paper is to test whether the 2007 identification of commonality in liquidity by Galariotis and Giouvris for the UK is robust to different methodological approaches; to find whether commonality is priced; and to identify how changes in trading regimes, hence liquidity provision, affect the relationship between commonality and excess returns.

The paper builds on the 2001 methodology of Huberman and Halka. In addition it extracts common factors using principal component analysis to test the effect of commonality on excess returns.

The findings of this paper confirm the presence of a systematic time‐varying component in UK spreads (under a different approach) even after controlling for well‐known spread determining variables.

The paper provides original evidence on the presence and the effect of systematic liquidity on asset pricing in the UK, showing that it is sensitive to the nature of trading regimes. It is concluded that in order‐driven regimes the effect of commonality on asset pricing is reduced, hence policy makers should consider this when deciding on trading systems

The aim of this paper is to examine the role of liquidity in asset pricing in a tiny market, such as the Portuguese. The unique setting of the Lisbon Stock Exchange with regards to changes in classification from an emerging to a developed stock market, allows an original answer to whether changes in the development of the market affect the role of liquidity in asset pricing.

The authors propose and compare two alternative implications of liquidity in asset pricing: as a desirable characteristic of stocks and as a source of systematic risk. In contrast to prior research for major stock markets, they use the proportion of zero returns which is an appropriated measure of liquidity in tiny markets and propose the separated effects of illiquidity in a capital asset pricing model framework over the whole sample period as well as in two sub-samples, depending on the change in classification of the Portuguese market, from an emerging to a developed one.

The overall results of the study show that individual illiquidity affects Portuguese stock returns. However, in contrast to previous evidence from other markets, they show that the most traded stocks (hence the most liquid stocks) exhibit larger returns. In addition, they show that the illiquidity effects on stock returns were higher and more significant in the period from January 1988 to November 1997, during which the Portuguese stock market was still an emerging market.

These findings are relevant for investors when they make their investment decisions and for market regulators because they reflect the need of improving the competitiveness of the Portuguese stock market. Additionally, these findings are a challenge for academics because they exhibit the need for providing alternative theories for tiny markets such as the Portuguese one.

The results have important implications for individual and institutional investors who can take into account the peculiar effect of liquidity in stock returns to make proper investment decision.

The Portuguese market provides a natural experimental area to analyse the role of liquidity in asset pricing, because it is a tiny market and during the period studied it changed from an emerging to a developed stock market. Moreover, the authors have to highlight that previous evidence almost exclusively focuses on the US and major European stock markets, whereas studies for the Portuguese one are scarce. In this context, the study provides an alternative methodological approach with results that differ from those theoretically expected. Thus, these findings are a challenge for academics and open a theoretical and a practical debate.

Understanding the pricing of real estate equities is a central objective of real estate research. This paper aims to investigate the impact of liquidity on European real estate equity returns, after accounting for well-documented systematic risk factors.

Based on risk factors derived from general equity data, the authors extend the Fama-French time-series regression approach by a liquidity factor, using a pan-European sample of 272 real estate equities.

The empirical results indicate that liquidity is a significant pricing factor in real estate stock returns, even after controlling for market, size and book-to-market factors. In addition, the authors detect that real estate stock returns load predominantly positively on the liquidity risk factor, suggesting that real estate equities tend to behave like illiquid common equities. These findings are underpinned by a series of robustness checks. Running a comparative analysis with alternative factor models, the authors further demonstrate that the liquidity-augmented asset-pricing model is most appropriate for explaining European real estate stock returns.

The inclusion of sentiment and downside risk factors could provide further insights into real estate asset pricing in European capital markets.

This is the first study to examine the role of liquidity as a systematic risk factor in a pan-European setting.

This study aims to systematically review the literature in the fields of liquidity, informational efficiency and default risk. The authors outline the key research streams and provide possible pathways for future research.

The study adopts bibliographic mapping to identify the most influential studies in the research fields of liquidity, informational efficiency and default risk from 1984 to 2021.

The study identifies four key research themes that include efficiency and transparency of markets; corporate yield spreads; market interactions: bonds, stocks and cryptocurrencies; and corporate governance. By assessing publications published from 2018 to 2021, the authors also document seven key emerging research trends: cross markets, managerial learning and corporate governance, state ownership and government subsidies, international evidence, machine learning (FinTech approaches), environmental themes and financial crisis. Drawing on these emerging trends, the authors highlight the opportunities for future research.

Keyword searches have limitations since some studies might be overlooked if they do not match the specified search criteria, even though their relevance to the topic is under investigation. Adopt the R project to expand this review by incorporating more literature from other databases, such as the Scopus database could be a possible solution.

The four key research streams contribute to a comprehensive understanding of liquidity, informational efficiency and default risk. The emerging trends integrate existing knowledge and leave the chance for innovative research to expand the research frontier.

This study fulfills the systematic literature review streams in the fields of liquidity, informational efficiency and default risk, and provides fruitful opportunities for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to employ a unique data sample to study the relationship between risk and the use of taxable real estate investment trusts (REITs) subsidiary (TRS).

Total volatility is decomposed into systematic risk and idiosyncratic risk in order to examine whether cross-sectional variations in REITs’ risk are related to use of TRS. The relation between REITs risk and REITs liquidity is also explored in this paper by using three liquidity measures: percentage spread, dollar volume and price impact. GMM regressions are used to explore diversification and risk-adjusted returns.

The evidence, using GMM regressions, suggests that: REITs increased in firm risk during the years 2002-2011; REITs with TRS are more liquid than REITs with non-TRS; TRS-REITs’ prices becomes more volatile than the broader market after year 2007 – S & P500 index is used as benchmark; and TRS-REITs’ portfolios requires a larger number of securities to obtain similar levels of diversification as non-TRS portfolio.

TRS-REITs’ portfolio is riskier (systematic risk) than non-TRS-REITs, its assets are the more demanded (liquid) among investor, meaning that when necessary those assets can be easier converted to cash without affecting to much its prices. When S & P500 is used as benchmark the TRS-REITs’ portfolio requires a larger number of securities to obtain similar levels of diversification as non-TRS portfolio.

This paper employs a unique data sample to study the relationship between risk and the use of TRS in the USA. Although the relationship between risk and returns has been largely studied in the finance field, still there is a gap in REIT literature about the relation between REIT return volatility and the use of TRS’s.

The interbank market in China experienced remarkable squeezes in liquidity in 2013. In particular, the overnight Shanghai Interbank Offered Rate reached a historical high in June. Banks were unprepared, facing the occurrence of various liquidity demands simultaneously. Effects of the liquidity squeeze spread across markets, and concerns were expressed about the health of the banking sector in the world’s second largest economy. Yet the central bank of China maintained an unswerving view that the tightness of liquidity was only structural, and could be overcome by the commercial banks themselves. While it may be too early to judge whether the central bank was correct, or whether there is systematic liquidity risk in the banking sector, markets received a clear signal from the People’s Bank of China. The central bank stopped acting as a ‘perpetual put option’ for commercial banks and refused to take responsibility to satisfy liquidity needs in the interbank market. Its intention is clear; that is, to adjust monetary policy and support economic reform in China. The new Chinese government seems determined to steer a new course away from the previous growth episode. Its resolution has been published and actions have been taken. Among them, the central bank’s changes to monetary policy have received responses from the markets, and the People’s Bank of China is now in the vanguard of a battle to squeeze liquidity. It is difficult to predict what further actions the government will take. However, it should be aware that the driving force of economic reform in China comes from structural change and productivity improvement. Without follow-up policies, complication in the financial system could undermine the central bank’s effort and international capital flows may quickly substitute the opening position of the central bank in the interbank market. More wisdom is required if China is to win the battle for deleveraging and structural reform.